


Three's (Good) Company

by DovahDoes



Series: Shall We Not Revenge [2]
Category: Doctor Sleep (2019), Doctor Sleep - Stephen King
Genre: (mostly just implied), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Angst, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Cause it's a bit necessary if he's essentially dating Rose and Crow, Dark!Dan, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Multi, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Rose, Protectiveness, Rose is SO much fun, Threesome - F/M/M, and I think a bit of, esp if you combine the book and movie versions, no spoilers for the book here, same for Crow and Dan, who are generally soft for him but are v much still Not Great People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21613507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DovahDoes/pseuds/DovahDoes
Summary: Rose the Hat and Crow Daddy run across Dan during his dark years, and in an interesting series of events (that are not explored in this fic), find out that he shines brighter than almost anyone else they haveeverencountered.  Following that discovery, Rose has an idea similar to the one she has in canon about Abra, and Dan ends up a sort of 'kept man' in the weirdest way imaginable.With their own source of steam in hand that keeps himself constantly blitzed out of his mind with alcohol (and whatever else), the two soon splinter off from the rest of the True Knot with their strange bounty.Thisfic takes place several years after all of that, when things have progressed to their including Dan in their relationship.  He's even on the wagon (purely because dropping the booze improves the taste of his steam, of course, and for no other altruistic reasons on Rose and Crow's part).Their live-in meal ticket (and yes, often lover) has a nightmare-- not uncommon-- and they take it in stride.  However, unbeknownst to them, danger not only lurks nearby but begins to actively pursue their motley threesome.
Relationships: Crow Daddy/Dan "Danny" Torrance - Relationship, Crow Daddy/Rose the Hat, Crow Daddy/Rose the Hat/Dan "Danny" Torrance - Relationship, Rose the Hat/Dan "Danny" Torrance
Series: Shall We Not Revenge [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1560202
Comments: 15
Kudos: 79





	Three's (Good) Company

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who read 'The Shining' and 'Doctor Sleep' books, before watching the 'The Shining' film and then seeing 'Doctor Sleep' in theatres??? Heh heh-- _this guy_.  
> *
> 
> Suffice it to say that the books and movies are _incredibly_ different in a lot of ways, but that the characters kind of remain the same. I have a lot of Feelings because the book, of course, spent more time on characterization.
> 
> For example, we spend a _lot_ of time with the True Knot in the novel version of 'Doctor Sleep'....which is perhaps why melding the book versions of them with the movie versions is _so_ much fun. >:] Movie!Rose monologuing about how bomb it was feeding off of Dan put An Idea into my head about an alternate version of the plan to kidnap Abra and keep her as a re-usable source of steam.
> 
> Like... what if Rose (and Crow) got a hold of him during his 'dark years': he's already keeping himself essentially 'doped up', and _wow_ if that is not a person constantly suffering (and producing great steam), what is? (And then my brain was like 'okay, but what if it turns out that making someone _happy_ /pleased produces even _purer_ steam than causing pain does?
> 
> I'm not saying that Rose and Crow (who have an open relationship, as per the book) routinely have some freaky-ass sex with Dan and take his steam and then get horned up and do it all over again, but..... it def happens. haha.
> 
> And then they catch feelings for Dan, eventually (and the same happens in reverse, not that anybody ever says so outright), and my AU exists!

“…anny!”

~~ **_Daniel_**! ~~

His breath is short and stars dance in his wavering vision, but he can just barely hear the jarring sound of someone calling his name… of some _ones_ calling his name. One of them doing so _in his head_.

Suddenly, the sickeningly strong stench of bourbon clouding his thoughts and burning his nose clears away as if by magic. As the scent of Jim Beam fades away into his subconscious, so too does the horrific vision of his father’s mad, rage-filled visage.

The hellish dreamscape of his childhood home abruptly melts into the familiar, low-lit interior of his bedroom— of _their_ bedroom. His lightly-clothed body begins to shiver, partially from a sudden chill, and partially as a result of remembered terror careening into its natural next stage: crashing adrenaline levels and an ongoing emotional rollercoaster.

_God_ does he want a drink, even in spite of the way he can still feel the heavy, clammy grip steadily closing his trachea… until the thought of encountering that same _smell_ again pulls him up short of even fully experiencing the old craving.

And wow— everything is still very much fuzzy and dark-edged again, and his galloping heartbeat is _incredibly_ loud to his ears, making him have to concentrate to tune back into his surroundings entirely.

Hands that he’s only just noticed have been running through the lightly grey-dappled hair at his temples pull his head into a cotton teeshirt-covered bosom, and simultaneously, the _other_ pair of hands that have been pressing his forearms down into the bed lift up to allow him freedom.

Gasping raspily and shivering hard, Dan curls up and rolls fully onto his side, burrowing closer to the source of comfort that is the hyper-warm body to his right, winching his eyes shut tightly and biting down on as many of the pathetic keening noises that still want to escape him as he can.

_Jesus_ , what a sight he’d make if his father were to see his forty-something-year-old grown man of a son whimpering like a scared baby in the arms of a beautiful woman. Thankfully, the hysterical laugh the imagined scenario prompts is successfully repressed from bubbling up amongst hitched panting

A voice reverberates through the chest he’s comfortably held against, and he starts picking up a few words, here and there— the phrases and matching mental sentiment beginning to help him ease back from his heightened state of anxiety.

“S’alright, _mo rún_. You’re here in the now, with _us_. Calm yourself— need you t’ breathe, hm? Nothing ‘round your throat— _just breathe_ , for me. …Crow?”

Without realizing what he’s doing, Dan cradles his right arm close to his chest, feeling the phantom-ache of a broken bone long-healed shooting up through his nerves. His wrists feel a bit sore, too, as does his pounding head, and it’s all he can do not to flinch when he feels the luxurious mattress beneath him shift as another person’s weight is added on somewhere behind him.

“Right here, darlin’. Just grabbing water and something for the headache….”

A long inhale is audible, then, tapering off into a distinctly inhuman almost-growl: Crow must have tasted his fear-steam.

“Huh. This was a bad one, huh?”

Wanting to answer, but still feeling a bit too out of it to use out-loud words, Dan exhaustedly reaches out the barest amount to his two bedmates telepathically, instead, sure that even his _mental_ voice sounds wrecked.

**~~ Fuck. Not sure what triggered it, this time. S’just… a random one, I guess. Did I break anything? ~~** he intones slowly

A much be-ringed set of fingers runs through his hair, from front to back, before lifting away and then then gently brushing over his lightly stubbled jaw. At the familiar prompt he begins opening his eyes, but immediately squints, as even the small amount of light causes his low-grade stress-induced headache to flare up, momentarily.

Hovering slightly above him, Rose’s face peers seekingly at his own, not looking particularly irritated by any potential property damage. Inching closer with whatever he’s brought with him, Crow confirms Dan’s updated assumption.

“No, nothing— just moved some furniture around a bit. And we always tell you: if we weren’t ready for your shine and what comes with it, we wouldn’t have kept you. Our casa is your casa, and it’s got space for all of our baggage and more. Now here, let’s see if you can sit up enough to take this. It’s just some Aleve PM.”

With reluctance, Dan completely parts from Rose’s embrace (although not without a lingering caress across his shoulder as he rolls away and starts straightening up). His ineffective efforts are quickly bolstered by the supernaturally strong male sitting at his hip, who has him mostly upright and bracing much of his weight against Crow’s comfortably warm side.

**~~ Thanks. _Jesus_ , I feel wiped out… ~~**

Out of breath and still shivering, occasionally, the youngest among the trio lifts his ‘good’ arm to try and take the mug he already _knows_ is half-filled with ice water, the temperature-sensation having slid through his foggy brain when he’d accidentally let his mind wander over to his partner’s.

**~~ Sorry, sweetheart— hard to keep to myself, right now. Too tired. ~~**

Warm arms surround him from behind as Crow fluidly rearranges them, and Dan lets his heavy head half-loll onto the sturdy shoulder nearby, blinking as he notices that Rose has sat up, herself, and is moving in closer, kneeling up a bit where she finds space between the two men’s sprawled and/or bent legs. Time stretches and contracts for Dan, and Rose has somehow gotten a hold of the pills and the cup, which she effortlessly balances while moving closer.

Meanwhile, Crow’s ever-shifting mind sends back the equivalent of his waving off something unimportant.

“No harm done: hardly even felt anything. Rosie could probably use a lesson or two on that technique, too.”

“Mmhm— really, then?” the dark-haired woman says, reading the potentially insolent wisecrack for what it clearly is: an attempt to revive Dan a bit.

Its success is immediately shown by an amused tilt of the younger man’s mouth, listless though he still seems, otherwise.

“Here, just… put your arm down, Danny. Open y— good. Now the water…”

Gripping Rose’s wrist, lightly, to help direct the water sluggishly flowing from the mug being held up to his mouth, Dan is so far-gone in his exhaustion that he can’t even feel the full weight of the embarrassment that incidents like this tend to bring on. Instead, as he finally drinks his fill of the cool liquid in the old mug and swallows down the two chalky pills on his tongue, he only feels relief and a rather sappy bloom of gratefulness for his two partners.

Sighing, more of the tension in his frame unwinds, and he unconsciously rubs at one of his wrists with the other hand, only for calloused fingers to catch his own mid-motion, while an arm winds more securely around his waist. (Consequently, he’s pulled in even closer to the hard, furnace-warm body behind him.)

A kiss is pressed against the side of his neck and Crow’s voice sparks warm tingles in his chest.

“Sorry. You were tryin’ to get at your own throat when you were already having trouble breathing. Had to use my full strength in case you started using your Shine to break free.”

Work-toughened fingerpads dance over the developing bruises on one of Dan’s wrists, but he pays it no mind because Rose turns back toward them both after having placed the empty mug on her bedside table. Her almost aggressively captivating features are cast in shadow by the low, night-time lighting they tend to favour inside the spacious RV, but Dan can still make out the protective edge in her expression.

Or maybe he’s lost his grip on his innate ability to brush through other people’s minds, again, for the second time in as many minutes. For a second, Rose’s eyes flicker blue and white in the darkness, inhaling the barest wisp of the nightmare-made steam.

“It’s alright, _mo rún_. Now come— you had a stressful day, today: it’s hard work concealing your power _and_ ours from that group of our kin we felt, earlier. Lie back down with old Rose and we’ll get you settled in nice and cozy, again.”

Between one breath and the next, Dan finds himself tucked up tight against their trio’s only female— his back to her front— breathing a bit easier in the secure warmth slowly stealing back over his chilly limbs. There’d been a time several years ago, back when he was only freshly sharing intimate space with the two Hollow Souls, that he’d been almost mortified to be ‘relegated’ to the position of ‘little spoon’, but time with the two long-lived life partners who paid not much mind to social mores has helped erode his unease around a _number_ of things.

Jack Torrance had done a number on his son— which _very_ possibly contributed to why said son had not only fallen in with two lifeforce-devouring supernatural creatures, but had somehow _fallen_ _in love with_ them. (Not that Dan ever plans to deal with or admit to the fact to anybody, even himself.) Ironically, the two (mostly) soulless predators have seen him living the closest thing to a stable, enjoyable life since his mother passed away some 20 years earlier.

Sure, up until they all started shacking up, the pair had been regularly torturing and draining other human beings of their lifeforce for literal centuries, but frankly, Dan hadn’t done much better by Deenie and her baby nephew in Wilmington all those years ago. Or the swathes of people he’d encountered and somehow let down or hurt while firmly in the grips of the worst of his alcoholism.

Or, worst of all, himself.

Still, the three have a symbiotic relationship: his shine— which they’d encouraged him to fully embrace— providing a never-ending buffet of hyper-potent nourishment for Rose and Crow, and they provided… a focus for his relationship-starved, codependent tendencies, to be frank. An outlet for his inevitably unrequited love, to be franker yet.

They’d also ended up being strangely adept allies in Dan’s battle to avoid falling back into the bottom of the bottle ever again. (According to Crow, the sour taste that over-indulging in drink brought to his steam was repugnant— the complete opposite of the unmatched, exceptionally delectable quality that _pleasure_ apparently brought to the bouquet of his shine-enhanced life force.)

As a testament to his comfort around the two predators, a thoroughly sleep-addled Dan only barely reacts to the scrape of one long fang against the back of his bare shoulder, grumbling half-heartedly as some of Rose’s untamed locks tickle his neck until he wriggles his head around to a better position on the pillow. A long tongue soothes the spot that her eyetooth nicked before the older woman chuckles throatily, not at all apologetic.

The weight in front of the trio’s youngest member shifts slightly, moving closer to the spooning pair, before a set of lips presses briefly against Dan’s, a neatly trimmed mustache and beard tickling his own stubbly face for a moment.

Still holding his uninjured right arm close to his body, Dan furrows his brows and wrests his heavy eyelids open just enough to half-heartedly glare at the sleep-mussed older man who’d managed to disrupt the light doze he’d been about to fall into.

“Tryin’ to sleep— you two can fuck once I’m asleep or use the pullout couch. ‘M _tired_ ,” he grunts, making an effort not to just straight up whine about it.

His heartbeat has finally switched from overactive to sleep-slow, and he just wants to get some _rest_ , God (and lovers)-willing.

“ _Daniel_ …” Rose’s warning tone comes, seemingly drawing close to her limit for making nice that evening.

Starting to feel a bit snippy, himself, too, Dan inhales through his nose, preparing to deliver a suitably irate comeback, but is distracted by a pair of suddenly glowing blue eyes not far from his own.

**~~ Hey, don’t you _dare—_ ~~**

“Sleep, Dan,” Crow rumbles, imbuing his voice with the power he’d just acquired after taking steam from the True Knot girl they’d killed earlier that day.

And before he can even get pissy about the heavy-handed move, he drops into an all-encompassing, restful darkness that will ideally block any further nightmarish visions.

Settling back in, himself, Crow tugs the quilted comforter back up from where Dan had kicked it during his disrupted (and disrup _tive_ ) sleep earlier. Pulling it up over the man between he and his longtime paramour, he then draws a bit closer to the prone body before him, daring to rest his forearm against a partially closed hand.

Unlike Rose, who has always been one to literally cleave onto what (or who) she deems as ‘hers’, Crow’s life experiences have left him content to simply stay _close_ , generally.

Still, when a dark head of tousled hair raises up high enough to show burning, fluorescent blue eyes, he almost scooches back in deference.

“You spoil him,” she states, without any particular tone.

“Perhaps,” he replies, evenly. “No more than you, _Boss_. Haven’t seen snow for how many years, now?”

“…shut up, Crow.”

And because he’s generally a pretty intelligent man, he does, allowing the calming quiet of the forested, remote campground around them to lull him back to sleep, letting his mind wander in any direction it chooses. As it often has for the past several years, it settles on Dan Torrance as it begins quietening for slumber.

Dating your fucking food: who among the True Knot that they’d split from years ago could ever imagine, he wonders idly…

*

Just past a state line a day’s drive away, a middle-aged man with a dollar-store bandana tied overtop of an unassuming, balding head of hair sits up from where he’s been lying prone for the past 7 straight hours.

Kicking the extended leg of the reclined armchair next to his cot, he is satisfied to the hear quiet, snuffling snores nearby cut off with a startled snort. Apron Annie’s dark eyes glare at him as she laboriously props herself up on her elbows.

“ _What_ , Barry? Done with your fancy nap? Just cause you’re pissed you can’t do everything as good as Rose could doesn’t mean you gotta get testy wit—”

“I _found them_ , Annie!” he cuts her off, glee dripping from his every word, in spite of how his stomach clenches in on itself from the hunger his 2-day fast has brought on. “I found them and we’re gonna get everyone together to show them what happens to the selfish in the True Knot _._ Gonna remind them that _‘what is tied cannot be untied’_. _”_

**_FIN_ **

* * *

**_Mo rún_** \- my love; my secret; my mystery; my secret love. _(_ Irish Gaelic _)_ **(said: mu ROON)** \----- Obviously _,_ this is a fun endearment for Rose to use with Dan because of all the things it can mean. If you wanna hear it pronounced aloud by native speakers, check it out [here](https://forvo.com/search/r%C3%BAn/ga/) on Forvo.

**Hollow Souls** \- I made some shit up to call these corrupted folks with shine eating other people's steam. They're nicknamed 'empty devils' in canon, but I'm extra af and wanted to add another term.

**" _What is tied cannot be untied..._ " **\- A phrase the True Knot says in the book to emphasize the close, 'unbreakable' bond that they all share after joining the group.

\-----------------------

Y'all would _not_ believe how much Dan uses pet names/terms of endearment in the book-- it's at, like, kind auntie/sweet old lady level, I swear. My man dropping all manner of 'honey' and 'sweetheart' and 'hun', like WOW. (Kinda makes sense, though? I think both of his parents did the same when talking to him in the novel version of 'The Shining'...) And Crow Daddy and Rose the Hat are pretty much as bad as he is: 'darlin' ', 'honeybunch', 'Rosie', 'honey', etc., which is why they _all_ on that pet name shit in this fic.

Also? This is irrelevant, but I think the world should know that Dan is, canonically, in possession of one very nice ass, as per a conversation with one of the patients at the hospice. So.... congrats to him... and Rose and Crow, too, I guess. hahaha

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, they killed Snakebite Andi. Mostly because I thought it'd be fun to give Crow Daddy a new shine power, since he's unable to do fancy, long-distance telepathy stuff like Rose and Dan. Except they didn't know she was the newest member of the particular group of True Knot they've been avoiding for the last few years.
> 
> (Jsyk to those who've read the book, I'm using the movie version of Barry-- Barry the _Chunk_ \-- for obvious reasons. Ya girl refuses to write about a character 'playfully' (nick)named 'Barry the Chink'. _Yikes_.)
> 
> Don't know if I'm gonna come back to this AU, as I'll inevitably have to man up and get to exploring a somewhat dark!Dan's headspace and that sounds like A Lot for my soft little heart. haha
> 
> *  
> Come check out [my writing blog](https://dovahdoes.tumblr.com/), where I post early fic snippets and keep you updated on what i'm working on in what fandoms!
> 
>   
> Kudos and comments are love: feel free to leave me some, kind readers~. (ღˇ◡ˇ)~♥


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